non-linear and the hypertext novel

An image from Jerusalem Explained........

.........................................................................Multi-linear symmetries are like a rope made of four strands...... you can do lots of things, make fabric, ropes, mats, sculptures, baskets, sail ships with it...its still a four stranded rope...you can even coil it in a basket and think it a snake like Buddha's maya ...think of Jerusalem as a four-fold multi-linear epic...each level of vision is like a strand in the four-fold rope........................


there is a term 'non-linear' used as a meta-form for the novel...Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl...it has structure analagous similar to that of Jerusalem Explained...

In Shelley Jackson's work, entirely on hypertext, Mary Shelley rebuilds a second monster that Frankenstein stopped making, she's female and they become lovers...the novel traces the stories of the different humans who contributed bits and pieces....each bit, eyes, hands mouth etc of the monster has its old owner's history...

That's the structure and it can be started anywhere and be followed anywhere...it is a hypertext novel

Blake is a multi-media artist, obviously not virtual, through, through the web, the new virtual Blake allows a the possibility of an hypertext approach. ...The Blake Archive allows so much more than the paucity of illumination available to earlier critics.

This edition of Jerusalem sees Albion as composed of the bits and pieces of his inner energies..Blake calls them zoas and emanations and sons and daughters etc...everything eventually has its own minute particular story and the story of them all is told in a four level multi-linear narrative....four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold.

Jerusalem Explained is designed to be read in a hyper/text/novel form ...not only is it a line by line analysis as it allows every line to be related to all other lines in an aesthetic whole...and it can and should be read as a linear narrative of four-levels of perception....BUT, also it can be read in an hyper/text/novel approach as you might read Shelley Jackson...begin anywhere and go anywhere.... it should always makes sense.... it is intended to be like a coffee/table/book...it can be read from any start, a reader can go anywhere, stop any time, flick through and start again... go virtually anywhere in any self-chosen route and the commentary will help unite the reading to the whole...and always it is Blake you are reading...closely savoring his poetry

It is the first such attempt in literary criticism I know of...and it depends entirely on the line-by-line-analysis and ten years of journeys in the 'oceans' of Blake Jerusalem and the computer as a means of liberating readers from the artificial stereotype of a-devoted-reader-who-can't-put-the-book-down....and likely don't pick it up again...or someone studying literature. This is written for real readers who start stop, start again, forget and repeat....and might takes minutes and minutes enjoying a line or two or an image...just the beauty.

The hyper/text/novel/ form is technically called a non-linear reading...but there can be no such thing literally...every reading is necessarily linear...so i call it a multi-linear reading....there is a causal narrative and clear authorial direction, and there is the always-true-reality that a reader stops whenever he or she feel likes it.

It opens Jerusalem up to personal encounters with Blake's poetry... otherwise Blake is just not so available...magnificent poetry laid over by the trowels of post-modern melancholic cynicism...

THE AMBIGUITIES OF AULT AND DORTORT ARE SHOWN AS RESOLVED...SOME EXAMPLES ....GIVEN LATER...........LATER BUT THE RESOLUTIONS ARE PRESENTED CLEARLY IN SHAKESPEARE'S HEIR

there seems to be a head on confrontation here...between Blake and the post-moderns and they are soooooooo very insulting...Ault and Dortort, ....they sound like a modern variant of that man Hunt in the 1809 exhibition who accused Blake of being mad ...only not locked up because he is harmless and it stuck with billy b...until his sanity was assured by the genius of Yeats, Ellis, Damon and Frye. ..... Hunt of course is famous only for this one 1809 attack on Blake.

There's been no significant change in terms of the poems structure since 1948...Ault and Dortort, Pierce and Otto all recapitulate Frye's three point conclusion...the poem begins in medias res, the myth is chaotic, and it founders on the apocalypse. The others just sing at the same song sheet...about both The Four Zoas and Jerusalem ...and call it ambigous...takes Derrida's continuous discontinuity and his view from Freud that the individual grammar of a dream transcends any archetypeal trace, and we have post-modernism.......the Frye Bloom brilliance and respect replaced by the failed poetic and self-subversion

???????????????................are we serious????????. did I miss a meeting???????????????????

Jerusalem Explained actually does give the work's four level multi-strand narrative and with its hyper/text/novel form, Blake poetry without fashist domination.

With the ambiguities resolved so are the criticisms resolved...there are always more...... poetry depends on ambiguity and the escape of words from the paradigmatic and syntagmatic controlling cold frenzies of semiotics......... criticism depends on the unambiguous